First release of 2011 - Starting the year with a bang!

We hope your 2011 will be filled with health, joy and lots and lots of focused, uninterrupted creative work! May the flow be with you. 😉

Before we get to the details of today's release, I'd like to mention what we've been up to since we last spoke.

We wrote a Manifesto! OK manifesto might be too strong of a word for it, we're a bit more relaxed than that. Anyways, it's a little document which tries to explain our views on why both our product and our company are the way they are. It's something that's been on my mind for a long time, I hope you'll like it! The Balsamiq Mockups Manifesto. Let us know what you think!!!!

myBalsamiq left the beta phase and entered what we're calling the gamma phase. Basically starting today we will operate myBalsamiq as if it was live - with paying customers, 30-day trials, standard support channels, but it will still be invitation-only. We have a bunch of bugs still to fix and a couple of little features to add, but now we'll do it with real paying customers. This will help us test our processes fully, in a private/intimate/friendly way. Once we have 30 happy paying customers, we'll launch (stay tuned on our blog or sign up at www.mybalsamiq.com). This is HUGELY exciting for us, we can really see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

Starting on January first and for the next six months, we are sponsoring one of my favorite non-techy blogs, called today and tomorrow. It's an artsy-geeky and always interesting gallery which makes my life more whole. I highly recommend it, and I'm super-proud to be able to help Pieter continue to inspire others via his blog. Because there's more to life than being awesome at wireframing! 😉

Last but not least, our good friends at Napkee are back in action, with a new release which fully supports Symbols! Check it out!

The Release

Here's what's new in today's Mockups release:

All Versions: you can now rotate icons! Thanks Jussi Laakkonen for the feature request and thanks to everyone for your patience on this.

Mockups for Desktop: you can now click on the export notifications! No more looking through the Finder / Windows Explorer for those files again. This works for single PNG export, multiple PNG export and PDF export.

All Versions: CTRL+1 and CTRL+ALT+1 no longer conflict. Thanks Leon for the bug report.

All Versions: empty groups are now deleted automatically when you exit them, and ignored on load and save.

All Versions: fixed an edge case (related to empty groups) which resulted in BMMLs getting corrupted on save. Thanks obelix and others for the report.

All Versions: fixed a bug with button labels being the wrong color when exported to PDF. Thanks to preichers and maxime.marais for the bug report and the debugging help!

All Versions: if your BMML has negative controls in it for some reason (some 3rd party tools might cause this), we now deal with it properly.

Mockups for Desktop: you can now execute command-line commands while Mockups is running.

Mockups for Desktop: you can now export whole folders via the command-line. Instructions here.

Mockups for Desktop: dramatic performance improvement when working with files stored in remote network drives. Thanks isaks and "google" for the bug reports.

Mockups for Confluence: fixed an issue with uploading images from the Desktop. Thanks Andreas Weder for the the bug report.

Mockups for Confluence: fixed an issue with loading mockups that had broken images in them. Thanks Jim Jarrett for the bug report.

How do I update?

Easy! Just install from our download page on top of your current installation. You won't have to re-register.

Hi, just a reminder that some of us are following your writings not for product news, we may never have used it, but for insights into running a small software company and it seems to have been a while since we had news of sales, problems, rewards, etc. Or have they moved to another blog? Cheers, Ralph.